Much effort has been expended in the past to provide a suitable positive cross identification system for use in hospitals and elsewhere so that the right patient and the right medicine, therapy, and test procedures are always associated. Improper association in the past has often occurred because of the technician or nurse improperly reading or recording a patient's identification number. Such misreading can result in misdiagnoses and the administration of improper medicine and improper therapy. In the extreme, improper medicaments can be fatal. In the case of blood transfusions, for example, if a patient is administered the wrong blood type, death can be the result.
Aside from diagnostic and treatment procedures, proper patient identification is required in the more mundane areas relating to patient billing. Proper records must be kept so that the patient is ultimately billed for the various treatments and medicines administered. Because of the accidental misreading of a patient's identification bracelet, billings often are charged to either an unknown or wrong person.
One system that has been devised to alleviate many of these problems is that described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,698,383 assigned to Baxter Laboratories. In the U.S. Pat. No. 3,698,383 patent, an identification band, fastener, and pilot tube for use in blood handling procedures is described. The fastener and pilot tube are integrally connected to the identification band which is separated for placement on the patient. Both the identification band and pilot tube carry removable labels with like indicia. While this approach is a step in the right direction, it does not prevent the technician from using the wrong set of patient identification numbers on the wrong patient. Nor does it prevent the technician from treating the wrong patient.
Another patient identification system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,164,320 assigned to Medical Laboratory Automation. In this patent, elements are provided with a coating of a magnetizable material and encoded along a circular track with a patient identification (I.D.) number. These magnetized elements are used to associate a patient with a specimen taken from him or with medicine or treatment to be given him. For this purpose, the patient I.D. number and a sample container fitted with a like magnetically encoded collar are compared electronically. Even here, a careless technician is not prevented from placing the wrong patient's specimen into that container if he neglects or fails to pay attention to the comparison or fails to even use the comparator that is available to him.
To this end, various locks have been devised to provide a more positive system for insuring that medicaments are given to the proper patient. The locks are encoded with the recipient's I.D. number. Thus, the technician is required to go to the patient, read the patient's I.D. number, and use that number to decode the lock and only then be permitted to administer the medicament. While such system overcomes the disadvantages of several of the other earlier systems described above, it is still somewhat awkward to use and is manual. Since the patient's identification number is manually placed into the lock, improper encoding often occurs.
It would be desirable to have an easily used positive cross-identification system that assures the correct match between patient and therapy or medicament. Provision for locking the medicament until proper identification is made should also be available.